Gearing up for a grand arrival in Ghana
Posted: Monday, July 06, 2009 9:49 AM
By Mara Schiavocampo, NBC News Digital Correspondent
ACCRA, Ghana - I just landed in Ghana's capital city, Accra. On Friday, President Barack Obama will also touch down here, for his first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa (he was in Egypt last month). If history is any guide, he will be greeted like a rock star, times ten. When Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush visited this country (in 1998 and 2008, respectively), thousands swarmed the streets to welcome them.
Because Obama is the son of a Kenyan, many Africans consider him a native son, and they can't wait to give him a hero's welcome when he arrives as the first African-American U.S. President. Just the announcement of his upcoming visit was front page news.
This trip is not only significant for Africans, but for African-Americans as well. While in Ghana, Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama (and maybe their girls, Sasha and Malia) will be stopping at a former slave castle along the coast.
The dungeons are where Africans were brought and kept - sometimes for months at a time - before making the horrifying trans-Altantic voyage to the Americas. Africa's West Coast is lined with the remnants of this tragic past.
They all have a so-called "door of no return," the doorway through which Africans passed before being loaded onto ships. An estimated 12-25 million people passed through those doors. Not one of them ever saw their home or their families again. Not one.
Imagine then, the symbolic significance of the descendant of one of those slaves, returning as the American first lady. What a powerful moment it will be.
NBC News Producer Anthony Galloway and I will be covering this historic trip as many different ways as possible. Of course there will be tons of video which we'll be filing for Nightly News and the Nightly News website.
We'll be blogging regularly right here and posting original text pieces at www.TheGrio.com. And what would any multi-media reporting trip be without the media's new best friend, Twitter? You can follow our tweets here or directly at Twitter: @NightlyNews.
